Background

Harold Edward Puthoff, born June 20 1936 in Chicago, is an American electrical engineer and theoretical physicist. BA and MSc in electrical engineering, University of Florida. PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1967, with a thesis on the stimulated Raman effect and its application as a tunable laser. Prior to his SRI career he worked for the Naval Security Group in Washington and the National Security Agency.

Co-author with Richard Pantell of Fundamentals of Quantum Electronics (Wiley, 1969) — a textbook still cited in the field. Has published on polarizable vacuum (PV) theory, stochastic electrodynamics, and zero-point energy.

The Stargate Project

From the early 1970s through the 1980s Puthoff directed a classified research programme at Stanford Research Institute (SRI International) investigating «remote viewing» — the alleged ability to perceive distant locations and events through non-physical means. Funded by the CIA and later the Defense Intelligence Agency, the programme is now publicly known as the Stargate Project. Puthoff worked closely with physicist Russell Targ.

Puthoff and Targ studied Uri Geller, Ingo Swann, Pat Price, Joseph McMoneagle, and others. Their results were published in Nature in 1974 («Information transmission under conditions of sensory shielding»). The Stargate Project ran for over twenty years and consumed an estimated $20 million in public money before being terminated in 1995.

Skeptics including David Marks, Richard Kammann, James Randi, and Terence Hines have attributed the programme’s positive results to inadvertent sensory cueing in the testing protocols, sleight-of-hand by some subjects (Geller), and methodological flaws. UFO Oracle’s editorial position: the methodological criticisms are legitimate; the programme’s extraordinary continuity (twenty years, multiple agencies, ongoing classified successor work) is harder to explain if the entire enterprise was simply credulous error.

EarthTech International

In 1985 Puthoff founded the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin (IASA), incorporated under EarthTech International in 1991. EarthTech’s focus: energy generation and advanced propulsion research, including practical investigation of zero-point-energy extraction via Casimir-force devices.

EarthTech is the institutional home of astrophysicist Eric W. Davis — co-author with Puthoff of multiple Defense Intelligence Reference Documents (DIRDs) on advanced propulsion topics, and the author of the now-famous Wilson-Davis memo, in which Davis records his October 16 2002 conversation with Vice Admiral Thomas R. Wilson about a UAP crash retrieval programme that had refused Wilson access. The Wilson-Davis memo is one of the most important leaked secrecy-architecture documents in the public record.

To The Stars Co-Founder

In 2017, Puthoff co-founded the To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science with rock musician Tom DeLonge, former AATIP director Lue Elizondo, and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Christopher Mellon. TTSA was the corporate vehicle through which the FLIR1, GIMBAL, and GOFAST Navy UAP videos were brought into public view in late 2017. Whatever else can be said about TTSA’s commercial trajectory, the organisation single-handedly engineered the modern UAP disclosure era.

Zero-Point Energy & Propulsion Theory

Puthoff’s theoretical work has focused on the zero-point field as the possible origin of inertia and gravity (extending Andrei Sakharov’s 1968 conjecture), and on the polarizable vacuum approach to general relativity. His 1989 paper «Gravity as a zero-point-fluctuation force» (Physical Review A) and his collaboration with Bernard Haisch and Alfonso Rueda on inertia as a zero-point-field Lorentz force have been cited by NASA Glenn Research Centre’s Marc Millis as among the candidate frameworks for breakthrough propulsion physics.

Several physicists (Steve Carlip, Yefim Levin, Paul Wesson, Massimo Pigliucci) have published critiques of specific computational claims in this body of work. The disagreement is technical and ongoing. Puthoff’s 1998 patent on information transmission via modulated potential is cited in patent-law education as a case where mainstream examiners struggle to distinguish edge-of-physics innovation from pseudoscience — which itself underscores the boundary territory in which Puthoff has spent his career.

Why He Matters

Puthoff is the single most important continuity figure between the SRI-era classified work of the 1970s and 1980s and the modern public disclosure era. He directed Stargate. He founded EarthTech. He co-founded TTSA. He is the institutional scaffolding underneath Eric Davis’s Wilson-Davis memo. He is the «Hal» in the AATIP — AAWSAP — TTSA chain that runs through every major modern UAP development.

Whether the SRI remote viewing results are real, partial artefact, or fully spurious is genuinely debated by serious people. What is not debated is that the U.S. government funded Puthoff’s programme for over two decades, that he holds a Stanford PhD in electrical engineering, that he founded a research institute with active DoD reference document contracts, and that he was sufficiently trusted by senior intelligence figures to be a co-founder of TTSA at the moment of public disclosure. Discount him at your own risk.

Connections

• Stargate Project (CIA / DIA, 1970s–1995) — co-directed
• Russell Targ — SRI co-investigator
• Eric W. Davis — EarthTech colleague, Wilson-Davis memo author
• Jacques Vallée — SRI-era friendship; obtained Vallée’s 1974 security clearance via Kit Green (CIA)
• Tom DeLonge / Lue Elizondo / Chris Mellon — TTSA co-founders (2017)
• Featured in The Age of Disclosure (2025)
• Joseph McMoneagle — arguably the most credentialed surviving Stargate operative; later attached to legitimacy-of-the-program defenders

Sources

• Targ, R. & Puthoff, H. (1974). «Information transmission under conditions of sensory shielding», Nature, 251, 602–607.
• Puthoff, H. E. (1989). «Gravity as a zero-point-fluctuation force», Physical Review A, 39, 2333.
• Pantell, R. & Puthoff, H. (1969). Fundamentals of Quantum Electronics, Wiley.
• Millis, M. G. (2005). «Assessing potential propulsion breakthroughs», NASA Glenn / Annals NY Academy of Sciences.
• EarthTech International — earthtech.org
• The Age of Disclosure (2025), dir. Dan Farah.